In search for which camera to choose for gigapixels: Crop with less gigapixels? or Full Frame with more gigapixels? I made a simple comparison table where pixels per degree are calculated:

crop factor

angle in degrees

300mm 1.5x (APC Nikon)

1.5

3.1

300mm 1.6x (APC Canon)

1.6

2.9

300mm 1x (FF)

1

4.6

Assume, we have 300mm lens and portrait orientation of camera:

Camera

Megapixels

image width in pixels

crop

angle in degrees

pixels in 1 degree

Number of images required to cover 360 (with 0 overlap)

Equatorial 360 panorama’s width in pixels

Nikon D7200

24

4000

1.5

3.1

1290

116

464516

Canon 750d

24

4000

1.6

2.9

1379

124

496552

Canon 7d mkII

24

3648

1.6

2.9

1258

124

452855

Canon 5d mkIII

22

3840

1

4.6

835

78

300522

Nikon d810

36

4912

1

4.6

1068

78

384417

Canon 5ds r

50

5792

1

4.6

1259

78

453287

These number doesn’t take into account diffraction which can be a practical issue.

Sony APS-C cameras with 24Mpix should be treated similar to Nikon D7200.
More pixels in degree – better. FF is better than APC-S (requires less images). So for me the winner is Canon 5ds r – it allows to achieve almost the same pixel density as other cameras but you can get the same gigapixel with less images – which will mean less overlaps, less space on a card and computer required, faster shooting/stitching..

Note 4 camera: h16lsha00sm (according to *#34971539#)
Here is the final result picture (all the images zoomed to actual pixels):

Have to admit what Note 4 is very close or even better to 5dmk2 in Jpeg (what is not surprising as DSLR normally don’t add too much contrast/saturation/sharpness to JPEG engine), And 5d mk2 in RAW is all way better than Note 4 (thanks god :))

When I tried process which is my favored: PTGUI exposure fusion with layers and started to work with generated PSB file. The PSB has exposure blended layer and all the layers with black masks on top of it. As it is shoot from different points – many parallax errors were present – to fix them I normally finding layer with required part of image and required exposure (as it is bracketing) and reveal required part of it by painting white on a mask. If you shoot from tripod with panohead – then all layers are alligned – and revealed part is exactly aligned to the blended panorama, but in case of the building, you shot from different points – and parallax errors occurs. To fight with them i normally copy part of required layer on top of everything – and transform/allign/warp, As it was shoot during 18min – lights changes at dusk time dramatically – I had to apply adjustments on each copied layer (levels, color balance). Some layers have 5-6 clipped adjustment layers. At the end the result was what whole image was copypasted with adjustments so I deleted ptgui exposure blended part – the image was without holes – which mean I had manually created whole pano

The whole process took about 3 weeks (several evenings/nights per week)

Screenshoot of photoshop (somewhere in half “job done”)

Me (with a black backpack) during the shooting (thanks for photo to Sergey Semenov (airpano.com))